The subject technology is generally directed to transferring a web content display from one container to another container while maintaining state. A web content display includes displayed information associated with an application, such as a web browser, a document processing application, a social networking application, etc. The information displayed in the web content display may be downloaded over a network. For example, in a web browser context, a web content display may include displayed information within a tab of a window. A container includes a collection of one or more web content displays sharing a document object model (DOM) tree. For example, in a web browser context, a container may correspond to a window having one or multiple tabs.
A user of a computer may have multiple open containers. Each container may have multiple open web content displays. The user may wish to transfer a web content display from a first container having a first document object model (DOM) to a second container having a second DOM, for example, in a web browser setting, to consolidate multiple tabs (corresponding to web content displays) into a single window (corresponding to a container) or to logically arrange tabs associated with different tasks (e.g., email/calendar, trip planning, and research) into different windows. For instance, a user may wish to have his/her email and calendar-related tabs in a first window and his/her social networking-related tabs in a second window to avoid commingling email/calendar data and social networking data. However, maintaining the state of the transferred web content display while changing the DOM associated with the web content display may be technically challenging.